First Contact

In Disney’s movie, Pocahontas , the nubile Indian teen romances John Smith and stops a war between the British settlers and the American natives. Experience and history suggests that first contact between civilizations, both ancient and modern, was not nearly so friendly (with the exception of some isolated island encounters). Yet how are we to imagine the first contact between ancient Babylonians and Hittites? Or Romans and Gauls? Did they shout “hello!” or draw swords?

Jared Diamond has some experience with such first contact situations and suggests they may often have been hostile and dangerous. From his book Collapse:

Over the course of my biological fieldwork in New Guinea I have lived through such “first contact situation,” as they are called, and I found them dangerous and utterly terrifying. In such situations, the “natives” initially regard the Europeans as trespassers and correctly percieve that any intruder may bring threats to their health, lives, and land ownership. Neither side knows what the other will do, both sides are tense and frightened, both are uncertain whether to flee or to start shooting, and both are scrutinzing the other side for a gesture that could hint that the others might panic and shoot first. To turn a first-contact situation into a friendly relationship, let alone to survive the situation, requires extreme caution and patience.

What should we think of the choice to greet or fight a new civilization? Diamond focuses on the importance of a friendly relationship because the subject is how the Norse settlers in Greenland and their failure to learn from the Inuit how to hunt and survive. But treating new emissaries from a stronger civilization too kindly could result in subjucation and extinction, as Christopher Columbus writes of his first encounter with natives in the West Indies:

They willingly traded everything they owned… . They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features…. They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane… . They would make fine servants…. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.

How a small civilization going about its business deals with a sudden first contact with a previously unknown, technologically superior civilization, is called by anthropologists the Outside Context Problem—an event almost unimaginable until it happens—and can seal the society’s fate. The vast majority of such smaller civilizations were destroyed or assimilated, while a very few survived. The most successful of such situations was probably the Japanese encounter with Perry and his black ships in the mid-19th century, and the decision of feudal to Japan to adopt education, government, medicine, technology, and military tactics from the West.